Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh”

This fall, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) will present the
first major exhibition in 50 years to explore the legacy and widespread
influence of the revolutionary French painter Eugène Delacroix.
“Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh”
features 75 seminal paintings—including 30 works by Delacroix—to reveal
the artist’s indelible impact on French painting and how his radical
example led to the rise of modern art.

The exhibition also examines
Delacroix’s role as mentor and archetype during his lifetime and how his
work shaped the styles and predilections of many modern artists,
including Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse,
Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. Organized in
partnership with the National Gallery, London, “Delacroix’s Influence”
will be on view at the MIA from October 18, 2015, through January 10,
2016, and draws on works from the MIA’s robust 19th-century holdings, as
well as loans from 45 prestigious public and private collections
worldwide.

“Eugène Delacroix was the very engine of revolution that helped
transform French painting in the 19th century,” said Patrick Noon, the
MIA’s Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator and Chair of Paintings, and
organizing curator of the exhibition. “Kept at arm’s length by the
Académie des Beaux-Arts, he was an artist who was truly ahead of his
time, whose work and critical writings resonated deeply with his peers
and helped shape the trajectory of art history. This exhibition will
examine Delacroix as the bridge—in practice and in theory—between
Anglo-French Romanticism and Impressionism.”

“Delacroix’s Influence” demonstrates how Delacroix redefined the
possibilities of capturing the unique interplay between light and form,
as well as his fascination with optical effects, bold use of color, and
passion for the exotic. These innovations subsequently inspired the
spontaneity of the Impressionists, the dreamlike allusion of the
Symbolists, and the saturated color palette made famous almost a century
later by such artists as Renoir and Matisse.

Organized according to
four thematic sections—Emulation; Orientalism:
Imagined/Experienced/Re-Imagined; Narrative Painting at a Crossroads:
‘Truth in Art’; and Delacroix’s Legacy: In Paint and Prose—the
exhibition features a broad swath of paintings by Delacroix and his
admirers, including works by Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh,
Kandinsky, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Redon, Renoir, and Signac, among
others.

Notable works in the exhibition include:

• Delacroix’s Convulsionists of Tangier (1837-38), widely considered
one of the artist’s foremost masterworks and a cornerstone of the MIA’s
19th-century collection. The painting depicts a frenzied scene that
Delacroix witnessed during his travels to North Africa in 1832, in which
members of the Aïssaouas, a fanatical Muslim sect, crowd the streets.
Delacroix’s use of vivid colors and vigorous brushstrokes represent the
artist’s signature style and ability to expertly capture the turmoil and
urgency of his subject.

• Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1861), one of three Lion Hunt paintings
Delacroix produced for dealers and private collectors between 1855 and
1861. This final picture differs markedly in its spatial definition from
the flat composition of the earlier pictures—capturing a greater sense
of depth and clearly articulated narrative while also maintaining
intense and expressive brushwork.

• Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), the artist’s
first major work depicting modern urban life. The painting features a
band playing for a fashionable crowd that includes several portraits of
Manet’s friends—the poet Baudelaire, painter Henri Fantin-Latour, poet
and novelist Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach—as well
as his brother, Eugène, and the artist himself. To capture these
portraits, Manet used photographs as his source of imagery, a technique
often employed by Delacroix to underscore a distinct contemporary
sensibility in his work.

• Paul Cézanne’s Standing Nude (c. 1898), a representation of a nude
in an interior setting that evokes the traditional theme of a woman or
goddess at her toilet. Although Cézanne frequently depicted female
bathers in an outdoor landscape, the artist admired Delacroix’s The
Morning Toilet (or Woman Combing Her Hair) (1850), which he copied
shortly after it was exhibited in the 1885 Delacroix retrospective at
the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

• Paul Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889), one of
several religiously inspired paintings Gauguin created, in which a
vulnerable Christ is depicted in isolation prior to his impending
martyrdom—a pose derived from Delacroix’s Christ Shown to the People
(1850). The work’s dark colors and gloomy tonality severely contrast
against Christ’s flaming hair, further emphasizing the sense of
alienation in this overt personification of the artist.

• Van Gogh’s Olive Trees (1889), one of 15 canvases of olive trees
van Gogh created while housed in the asylum of St-Paul in St-Rémy in
southern France. In his correspondence with his brother, van Gogh wrote
of the olive tree: “It’s too beautiful for me to dare paint it or be
able to form an idea of it…if you want to compare it to something, [it
is] like Delacroix.” It was during this period that the artist created
many of his most renowned works, and the vibrant yellow and orange hues
in this painting suggest it was produced during the autumn.

• Odilon Redon’s Pegasus and the Hydra (1905), one of several
depictions of ancient myths showcasing the artist’s increasing
fascination with monster slayers. Influenced by Delacroix’s treatment of
similar subjects—in this case, his Apollo Slaying Python (1851)—Redon
conceived this work as a metaphor for the artist as an ostracized genius
eventually vanquishing chaos and adversity.

Delacroix’s posthumous influence persisted undiminished for nearly
five decades and over several generations of avant-garde artists, each
of whom, however divergent their own aesthetic programs, discovered
something of value in the legendary artist’s oeuvre and dynamic
personality. Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists,
Symbolists, and Fauves borrowed Delacroix’s ideas as deduced from his
varied and accessible painted works and profuse writings.

“Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh”
is co-organized with the National Gallery, London, where it will be on
view from February 10 through May 15, 2016.

The exhibition is
accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which comprises lead
essays by Patrick Noon, Curator and Chair of Paintings at the MIA and
organizing curator of the exhibition, and Christopher Riopelle, Curator
of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London.

About Delacroix:

Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) quickly
abandoned his classical academic training at the Lycée Impérial in favor
of self-study. He gleaned early insight and direction by copying old
master works in the Musée du Louvre, as well as from his friendship with
Théodore Géricault, a pioneer of the Romantic movement in French
painting. Géricault, who advocated for individual over formulaic
expression, profoundly influenced the development of Delacroix’s first
publicly exhibited painting, Barque of Dante (1822), which was
celebrated for its acute sentiment and imaginative composition. The work
was immediately acquired for the Luxembourg Palace— establishing him as
the next prodigy of French Romanticism—and became the most copied of
Delacroix’s paintings during the 19th century.

By the time of his death, Delacroix had established himself as a
champion of the avant-garde and was one of the most revered artists in
Paris. His paintings continued to be distinguished by their expressive,
improvisational brush strokes, which challenged the traditional
techniques and attitudes of the period’s preeminent Grand Style and
paved the way for younger artists’ stylistic experimentation and
creative innovation.

In the first gallery alone—a section called Emulation—are paintings by
Cezanne, Manet, Gaugin, Sargent, and several others, all arranged around
the exhibition’s signature painting, a rare self-portrait of Delacroix
himself. Among these are Manet’s famous Music in the Tuileries Gardens, as well as a remarkable copy of

Delacroix’s The Jewish Wedding in Morocco

done as an exercise by Renoir to tease out some of the Master’s secrets.

The following section, Orientalism, explores Delocroix’s travels to
North Africa and other artists’ fascination with this new territory,
recently colonized by the French.

Among the delights to be found here
are

Delacroix’s Combat of the Giaour, a classic horses-in-the-heat-of-battle painting,

and The Convulsionists of Tangier,
a familiar painting from Mia’s collection. Both evoke the furious
energy and violence that mesmerized painters in Paris, convincing many
of them to travel to Morocco in order to experience for themselves the
quality of the sun in that part of the world, as well as the barbarity
that, if Delacroix’s paintings were to be believed, apparently ran amok
in the streets there.

The way
Delacroix used color in "Christ on the Sea of Galilee" (1853) inspired
Vincent Van Gogh's use of color. The Dutch artist traveled to see the
picture and wrote extensively about it to his brother Theo and his
fellow artist Gauguin in the final year of his life.Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art

When
Delacroix first displayed "The Death of Sardanapalus" in 1827 it was
roundly criticized for flaunting the conventions of the day, and he was
threatened with the withdrawal of government support. However, the way
he used brush strokes to meld different color fields together was later
adopted as a mainstay of Impressionism.Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art

Eugene
Delacroix's "Bathers" (1854) was apparently inspired by an incident
during the artist's travels to North Africa, when he and some friends
accidentally came across two women doing laundry in a stream. Delacroix
used the picture to demonstrate some of his ideas on depicting the play
of light in nature. Generations of artists who followed used his ideas
to develop their own approaches.Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art

The very last painting Delacroix painted before his death in 1863, “Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains.”